Cryptocurrency

Stablecoin issuer Circle says it has cleared “substantially all” of the redemption and minting requests for its stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC). In a March 15 operational update, Circle said between the morning of March 13 to the close of banking business in the United States on March 15, it had redeemed $3.8 billion USDC and

The United States equities markets tumbled on March 15 after Saudi National Bank, Swiss Bank Credit Suisse’s largest investor, said it will not be able to provide any more funding to Credit Suisse due to regulatory limitations. Investors are nervous because Credit Suisse, which has large U.S. and global operations, warned on March 14 that

On this episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph, United States policy reporter Turner Wright and opinion editor Rudy Takala speak to listeners about their experiences at the ETHDenver conference from Feb. 24 to March 5. Wright arrived in time to interview industry experts, check out a “hacker house” and watch developers go through BUIDLWeek. Takala talks

The previous six months should have been extremely beneficial to Ether’s (ETH) price, especially following the project’s most significant upgrade ever in September 2022. However, the reality was the opposite: Between Sept. 15, 2022 and March 15, 2023, Ether underperformed by 10% against Bitcoin (BTC). The ETH/BTC price ratio of 0.068 had been holding since

The newest version of ChatGPT has caused a stir online, scoring high marks for SAT tests and highlighting vulnerabilities and exploits in Ethereum smart contracts. GPT-4 is the latest version of the highly influential artificial intelligence (AI) language model, boasting ‘human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks,’ according to its developer OpenAI. Aside from

The investment arm of major cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin is moving to support new stablecoin initiatives by backing a Chinese yuan-pegged stablecoin issuer. KuCoin Ventures has led a $10 million investment into stablecoin issuer and blockchain-based payment service provider known as CNHC. Announcing the news on March 16, KuCoin Ventures said that the funding round included

Web3 URLs — enabled with the launch of ERC-4804 — have made it onto Ethereum, allowing internet users to access Ethereum applications and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) without worrying about centralized censorship. The new Ethereum standard, titled “Web3 URL to EVM Call Message Translation,” was first proposed on Feb. 14, 2022, and was co-authored by ETHStorage founder

Ethereum-based noncustodial lending protocol Euler Finance is trying to cut a deal with the exploiter that stole millions from its protocol, demanding the hacker returns 90% of the funds they stole within 24 hours or face legal consequences. Euler Labs sent its ultimatum to the flash loan attacker who exploited the platform for $196 million by transferring

The Shapella hard fork has been executed on the Goerli testnet — the last test run before Ethereum validators will be able to withdraw their Ether (ETH) from the Beacon Chain. There were, however, issues with the hard fork. Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko noted that while deposits were being processed, the process didn’t run

Web3 wallet app MetaMask has introduced a number of new features aimed at enhancing privacy and giving users more control, according to a March 14 blog post by the developer. The new features come after MetaMask had previously been criticized for allegedly intruding on users’ privacy. MetaMask Mobile v6 is now available to everyone! Our

Wash trading on nonfungible token (NFT) marketplaces is back in the spotlight after critics claimed the fast-growing NFT marketplace Blur has incentivized the practice with its trading rewards scheme. 10% of Blur’s total token supply was distributed to users based on their trading activity in its second token reward scheme from Feb. 14. The platform

The depegging of USD Coin (USDC) and Dai (DAI) from the United States dollar prompted a frenzy of loan repayments over the weekend, allowing debtors to save a total of more than $100 million on their loans. Following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on March 10, the USDC price dropped to lows of $0.87 on March

The United States Justice Department is reportedly investigating the collapse of the TerraClassicUSD (USTC) stablecoin, which contributed to a $40 billion wipeout in the Terra ecosystem last May. Two agencies within the department — the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York — have interrogated former

Contagion from the Dec. 12 flash loan attack against Euler has spread far and wide, resulting in frozen or lost funds for 11 different decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, according to Dec. 13 reports from each of them on Twitter. Balancer, an Ethereum protocol with over $1 billion total value locked (TVL), is among the affected

Three banks, Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature collapsed within a span of a few days. That increased demand for United States government bonds, which sent the yield on the 2-year Treasury tumbling to 4.06%, a fall of 100 basis points since March 8. This was the largest 3-day decline since Oct. 22, 1987, following

Ethereum’s native token, Ether (ETH), rallied on March 13 after the U.S. regulators shored up wavering confidence in the banking sector led by the shutdown of $209 billion Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and $110 billion Signature Bank. U.S. emergency measures help Ether recovery Ether’s price rose over 3% to around $1,635, its highest level in

Privacy-oriented blockchain platform Aztec is preparing to shut down Aztec Connect, the network’s privacy infrastructure serving as the encryption layer for Ethereum. Aztec Network officially announced the upcoming closure of Aztec Connect, and plans to disable Aztec Connect deposits from front-ends like zk.money and zkpay.finance on March 17. According to a blog post by Aztec,

The death spiral of the Terra (LUNA) and TerraUSD (UST) ecosystem served as a catalyst to the 2022 bear market — causing losses in the millions, damaging investor sentiment and intensifying the regulatory spotlight over cryptocurrencies. However, the recent depegging of Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) led Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao to believe that traditional

Several USD Coin (USDC) holders have fled to other stablecoins since March 10 amid fears surrounding its solvency following the disclosure that a small portion of USDC’s collateral was held at Silicon Valley Bank. However, not all of them had success during panic selling. One user paid over 2,000,000 USDC to receive $0.05 of Tether

Top Stories This Week Silicon Valley Bank shut down by California regulator, holding over $5 billion for prominent crypto VCs Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was shut down by California’s financial watchdog on March 10 after announcing a significant sale of assets and stocks aimed at raising additional capital. The California watchdog appointed the Federal Deposit

USD Coin (USDC) issuer Circle plans to use “corporate resources” to cover the shortfall on its reserves following Silicon Valley Bank’s shutdown, said the company in a statement on March 11.  According to Circle, USDC liquidity operations will “resume as normal when banks open on Monday morning in the United States,” enabling USDC redemption at